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Folly

Sharing the shrinking beach in East Matunuck

2016/04/17
Climate change, Electricity from PV panels, Folly, Great black-backed gull, Piping plover
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The beach has been almost exclusively mine since the fall. When the three other people who can make that statement have been on the beach with me, we acknowledge each other with a wave or a greeting. Today each ganglia of beach users was isolated in its own  nervous system.

More than three beach users
Piping plovers’ nesting area
Edge of Plovers’ area at low tide; note how close high tide comes to the boundary.
Wind mill
Pavilion with PV panels
Evidence of moon hide tide’s advance. The hammock used to swing be able to swing!

The Piping plovers’ nesting area has been cordoned off in a shrinking space where a hedgerow of Rosa ragusas and poison ivy used to wall off the deep edge of the pond behind until Sandy wiped it out. The only birds I saw were Great black-backed gulls at various stages of development, but I know we’re into mating season. I can see that at my feeders.

The beach is shrunken too. High tide now comes nearly to the boundary of the Plover’s space on the western end of the beach. Moon high tides now creep under the houses on the eastern end. The last moon tide washed great plumes of good sand 40 feet into the parking lot at each of the passageways through the dunes. Of course nothing is fixed, except the trend.

A warm northern wind could not move the blades on the wind mill fast enough to obliterate their shape. But the silicon in the photo voltaic panels on the pavilion roof must have been excitedly hopping around in the presence of the sun’s  photons.  The sky was cloudless.

I read in the newspaper that those pavilion panels create $5,000 worth of power a year. Even the lesser number of panels on my folly have been creating about 30 kWs of power daily. (I hate examples that mix measurements, but I don’t know how many kilowatts are in $5,000 worth of power and I don’t know how many dollars are in 30 kWs a day of electricity. I do know that the 40 or so pV panels on the pavilion roof generates a great deal more electricity than do the 15 on my folly!)

One other parenthetical comment that I trust is apocryphal but frighteningly entertaining: I heard on the radio, I think, that an energy advisor to Trump said we should be cautious about using up the sun if we plan to develop alternative sources of energy! There’s a worry I don’t have to assume.

I’ll stick with my concern about whether the power production at the pavilion will reduce the carbon foot print of the beach and its users fast and fully enough so that we can all find some habitat we like there when summer rolls around.

 

In appreciation: the Folly

2015/10/04
Electricity from PV panels, Energy efficiency, Folly, Garden temple
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Come to think of it, the folly I am wanting to appreciate in this post is the second folly I’ve made on this property.

Let’s dispense with the first. It was a practice effort really, at spending money on a project few others could seen any value in. The first folly was built by the other Susan’s then boyfriend, now ex, Michael. For the record, he never returned to the Kennel House after that assignment. It still stands, however. This first folly consists of pressure treated 4 x 4s that form a low retaining wall signifying the edge of the meadow under the wild cherry tree. When Michael built this folly, the tree was a sapling; today it’s 50 feet tall. The wall runs along where a segment of the old split rail fence line used to divide the grass from the meadow but, after years of service, was in a state of dilapidation. Every summer, I took more segments of the fence out of commission as the meadow delineator, re-adapting whatever pieces were salvageable as vegetable garden fence or, for a while, a backdrop to Winkie’s Rose of Sharon from the Great House.

The second folly is the one I want to commemorate here. Today was to be its first public engagement. A book discussion for the RI Wild Plant Society was to convene on its platform at 3:00 pm. Predictions of dire weather and a small number of registrants figured into the decision to cancel the event.

But the folly has proved its mettle with the family this summer. Silently, almost imperceptibly, it furnishes the electricity for the main house all summer. I paid a small bill in April but no payment has been due since then. (The bills will return as the sun moves closer to the horizon for a shorter day and the household demands for electricity to run the geothermal heating system return.) My economist friends point out the folly of boasting about this since the initial cost of the construction of the structure and installation of the PV system will not soon be offset by the null electrical bills. But my practice is not to let such nay saying diminish my happiness with what is much ore than some utility infrastructure, although it is that too.

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How many pupae fortified themselves in those hammocks (there is a hint below)?

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How many berries to do you need to pick to take a snack to the folly?

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How many babies got rocked to sleep?

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How many naps were taken in the folly?

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How many afternoons passed while reading a book in a hammock surrounded but not enclosed?

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How many flora and fauna could be observed from the “blind” of the folly?

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Neither of my follies fit within the tradition of French, English or even American follies, although I discussed that here before. The newer one comes closer to fitting into the tradition of garden temples, despite its utilitarian, exposed structure design, because of the way it is used as a haven, a retreat, a place of quiet (unless you happen to be joined by pupae and berry pickers).

I’m drying the hammocks out in preparation for bringing them inside for the winter, in case the folly hammock season is over. It has been a glorious summer, made more so by the latest folly.

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High, small, ribbed and open

2013/12/08
Folly
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Sainte-Chapelle is being reconstructed in my meadow. I stepped up on the platform surrounded as it is now by a front and back wall and a single roof rafter and the likeness was inescapable. My space is tall, much taller than I envisioned from the plans, now that the back wall rises nearly two stories above the platform. It’s small; the front and back walls have circumscribed the platform’s brief stint as an infinity pool when it seemed to flow into the surrounding grasses without end. The White oak ribs, they would be called colonettes or ribs in a Gothic cathedral, will remain visible when the structure is finished. And open, I can see how the folly will frame views but otherwise not restrict them.

It may take an active imagination and schooling in medieval architecture to see the similarities between Sainte-Chapelle and my folly. (Try to look beyond all the construction gear.) After all, the folly sits in an old field not Paris. It is as rustic and unornamented as a barn. Sainte-Chapelle is stone decorated with gold leaf, stained glass and that heavenly blue paint that was a feature new to Gothic cathedrals when it was used there. Check Wikipedia’s entry for Sainte-Chapelle for a color photo. But stand in the folly and you will feel the verticality and lightness of High Gothic rayonnant style.

The wonder of it all is that the Sainte-Chapelle is such a gem and among my favorites cathedrals. King Louis IX, remembered often as St. Louis, built his shrine as part of his palace on the Île de la Cité to house the no doubt over-priced-for-what-it-really-was relic of the crown of thorns he bought in Constantinople. He undertook this project in the middle of the 13th century, just as the word folly appears in French according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. His is a folly cathedral just as mine is a mini-cathedral folly.